Slashdot Mirror
Samsung Caught (Again) Using DSLR Photo To Advertise Smartphone Camera (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Over at DIYPhotography (which we spotted via Daring Fireball), writer and photographer Dunja Djudjic says that she caught Samsung Malaysia using one of her photos to advertise the portrait mode capabilities of the Galaxy A8 Star, a midrange phone that came out over the summer. Djudjic suspects that Samsung licensed the picture from her through the photo site EyeEm, so payment isn't necessarily a problem. But Djudjic does say that the photo wasn't taken with an A8 Star. Instead, it was taken with an (unnamed) DSLR she owns.
Samsung doesn't state outright that the photo was taken on the A8 Star, but it's certainly implied by the page it's on, which is meant to illustrate the phone's capabilities. The page doesn't note that the images are simulated, and after showing Djudjic's photo, it proceeds to show the A8's dual rear cameras, implying a connection.
Samsung doesn't state outright that the photo was taken on the A8 Star, but it's certainly implied by the page it's on, which is meant to illustrate the phone's capabilities. The page doesn't note that the images are simulated, and after showing Djudjic's photo, it proceeds to show the A8's dual rear cameras, implying a connection.
....to laugh at this story being on Slashdot. And the Big Mac you buy looks like the one you saw on TV? It is advertising, people. Sheesh.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
In this day and age? Actually, I'm sure people would expect to be able to get that quality. No phone will compare to a DSLR, but with a skilled photographer modern phones really can take impressive photos. The 80's ads were dishonest, but it's even worse now that the differences are more subtle and to many people it's no longer seemingly out of the realm of possibility for phone cameras to be that good. Still boggles my mind that a company as large as Samsung doesn't have a skilled photographer or can't work with a freelance one to do it right. I don't know anyone who trusts ads, but I also don't think that's an excuse to let companies get away with lying; long way to go there though, deceptive ads aren't something unique to Samsung...
An advertiser would NEVER EVER create a misleading ad!!!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
This phone camera is so advanced, its reflection looks like a Nikon D850!!
#DeleteChrome
Normally there is fine print that explains that the image isn't real. Watch any smartphone commercial and you'll see it at the bottom of the screen. Apparently Samsung didn't do that this time.
My personal favourite was always the TV commercials for TVs.
With this new Shony Bullshit 9000, you can enjoy crisp images like the one we're displaying on your TV right now ... ummm, yeah, really?
I would argue that people blindly believe crap like this because they don't stop and think. They just think "wow, gotta get me some of that".
Several years ago it became quite obvious that car commercials really don't show cars anymore. They show 3D renderings of the car in some perfect idealised bubble. Then they show you how 'capable' the vehicle is, when there's no physical vehicle being shown.
That commercial showing how rugged that truck is? Well, that truck was never filmed doing that, it's all CGI these days.
And that commercial showing a tasty burger you'll never see in the store? Well, let's just say it's probably not edible because it's all been faked to give the appearance of a tasty juicy burger, but it's really a bunch of stuff you would never eat.
Ad companies operate on illusion, and most people are don't understand, or don't stop to ponder that the difference between that illusion and reality can be quite stark.
If you assume 50% of everything you see in an ad is complete bullshit, you'd be half right. ;-)
I would guess that people who are not serious about photography are more interested in having a good camera on their phone, not less. Because that is their only camera.
Off topic, but that is a cool picture
Even people who are serious about photography care about their phone camera, because that's the camera they have on them at all times. Inevitably even the keenest photographer will find himself wanting to shoot something when he doesn't have his DSLR to hand, and in that situation will want the best result possible with his phone.
Oh no... it's the future.
It goes beyond color accuracy and resolution. A true depth of field range can't be achieved with a lens that small. They were using real depth of field to show what fake simulated depth of field would look like. See the article for yourself - they're doing a lot more than using it as a placeholder image on a phone screen. They're advertising it as the actual capability.
"Better" is subjective. A good quality smartphone is just as good, if not better...DEPENDING ON CIRCUMSTANCES. For a pixel peeper or printing an 8 foot banner, the DSLR is certainly going to be sharper. But for normal size prints and online use, the phone is likely as good for most people. Now with the level of computational photography being done on Googles phone, you can actually get cases where it takes a heck of a lot of photoshop skill just to convert that DSLR image into something that looks as good as the what came straight out of the phone (I'm referring, of course, to the overall lighting of the image, not the pixel level sharpness).
And of course, they always say the best camera is the one you have with you. I've got a DSL with plenty of lenses (including Canon L series), but honestly unless the purpose of me leaving home is specifically for the act of taking photos, I don't drag that thing along. If I did weddings (I don't), I of course would never dream of professionally photographing someones wedding with a phone. But if I were attending a wedding, honestly I wouldn't dream of dragging along my DSLR these days. When I go on vacation I still tend to bring along my DSLR with me just because I can't stand the thought of not having access to it when it need it, but in reality it gets used for way less than 5% of my photos.
Pictures of food used to advertise the food MUST be the actual product. Now, that does not mean that the burger in the picture was put together by some minimum-wage high schooler, it wan't. It was put together by a professional photographer and food stylist who will take hours getting everything just right. But it is the real food.
Not to mention that you are looking at the image on a monitor (or phone screen) with its own limitations in resolution and coloring. It's like when they show 4k TV advertisements on TV - we are supposed to be amazed at the clarity of the picture they are showing until we realize we are already viewing it on my non-4k TV.
But, nevertheless, showing a picture that wasn't taken by the device they are advertising is deceptive and misleading and they should be called out for it if not sued.
But it's possible to put a digital photo on a website. If we were talking analog cameras, then your point would make sense. And anyway, Sammy could have done any colour correction they wanted. The practice of using a DSLR and try to pass it off as a photo taken with one of their phones reeks of massive scam. Intel tried to pull something with computer graphics once, when they had a videogame rendered backstage with a proper GPU and tried to pass it off as something that came out of their integrated GPUs. So the practice isn't new. God bless disclaimers...
I still quote a billboard I remember seeing back around Oklahoma City in the late 80s.
It was a very enlarged picture of some fancy expensive bottle of whiskey. The ad copy merely said, "Not actual size. (too bad)"
This space unintentionally left blank.
And you can't blame them, there's no way to fairly represent a screen image via other media (in that case print, in this case as part of an ad, squished, stretched, and color adjusted, intended for viewing in a web browser), so why bother?
Back when Sylvania made consumer TV sets, they had a TV commercial that, even as a kid, I thought was extremely clever. The V.O. announcer said something like this:
"Have you ever noticed that commercials for TV sets always show you how good the picture is, by displaying that picture on your CURRENT TV?
We at Sylvania think that is silly. So we invite you to visit your local Sylvania dealer and see for yourself just bright and clear the picture on the new Sylvania ColorBrite TVs are."
The page doesn't note that the images are simulated, and after showing Djudjic's photo, it proceeds to show the A8's dual rear cameras, implying a connection.
Actually, it does (at least now):
* All specifications and descriptions provided herein may be different from the actual specifications and descriptions for the product. Samsung reserves the right to make changes to this web page and the product described herein, at anytime, without obligation on Samsung to provide notification of such change. All functionality, features, specifications, GUI and other product information provided in this web page including, but not limited to, the benefits, design, pricing, components, performance, availability, and capabilities of the product are subject to change without notice or obligation. The contents within the screen are simulated images and are for demonstration purposes only.
* All images simulated for illustrative purposes.
But does it really matter? Even if they were real images, they'll have been made under ideal lighting conditions and hand picked from hundreds if not thousands of images so don't reflect real-world conditions. And this ad campaign was likely put together before the phone was available to take any photos let alone to go out and do enough photo shoots to find suitable images.
If you want to see how it does in real-world conditions, wait for the independent review sites to review it because most users will never duplicate the image quality seen in an ad.
Normally there is fine print that explains that the image isn't real. Watch any smartphone commercial and you'll see it at the bottom of the screen. Apparently Samsung didn't do that this time.
Curiously enough, iPhone ads always say the images are real at the bottom of the screen...
Some other countries don't allow this level of deception in advertising.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
In this day and age? Actually, I'm sure people would expect to be able to get that quality.
So you believe that are becoming more gullible than they used to be? Maybe it comes in waves. When I was young it seemed like people were more trusting. As I got older it seemed that people became more skeptical/cynical. I know that my teenager is a lot more gullible than I was at any age after 9 or 10 years of age. So perhaps that is the case.
Granted, I think that we were all a lot happier back in the days when the government lied to us and we believed it. So maybe there's something to being overly trusting.
It's almost like Samsung regularly cheats on benchmarks, lies in their advertisements, participates in price-fixing and collusion in order to screw customers, bribery of government officials, and blatant proven theft of intellectual property.
Who would have figured that they would continue this behavior, as any fines or punishments have been far less than the profits of continuing to do so?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
And then there's the Samsung engineering organization that put out leaking refrigerators, SSDs that slow over time (840 EVO), and exploding phones among other things. I unfortunately am the owner of said refrigerator and two of those SSDs. Sometimes I wish I could slap a JDAM kit on my fridge, drop it from 20kft, and guide it right into the window of the CEO's office.
It depends on what you're photographing.
Standard, everyday simple portrait, street photography, gee whiz type stuff perhaps.
I certainly don't whip out my smartphone when a hawk flies over, a long exposure with a tripod or even a macro shot.
Thus my disagreement about the " camera you have with you " argument.
For many situations a smartphone camera will suffice. For many others, it will not.
The image in TFA is meant to illustrate samsung's supposed shallow depth of field. Which lens did she use? what focal distance is the subject? what is the aperture setting?
In this situation the lens parameters are more informative than the name/model of a DSLR.
Interesting!